What state do you think this woulda cost them?
One conservative commentator on another board put it this way: “They’re such a great idea that no one will buy them unless they’re forced to; and according to the Democrats, this is because people are so stupid and selfish. Way to win people over”.
There you go. That kind of an attitude is one example that the majority of voters are tired of, and even after the fact, you don’t get it. You think it’s perfectly fine.
Everything is great. We just need more bureaucracy!
That’s a condemnation of those voters. “How dare you try to solve the problem!”
Of you read to the end of that post, you can see that the purpose of expanding the bureaucracy is to deport people faster.
You don’t think Trump’s plan to deport 15 million people is going to require bureaucracy too?
It’s a bit more complicated than that considering the southern Democrats were the party of pro-segregation white conservatives right up to and a bit beyond the era of Civil Rights in the 1960’s. Remember George Wallace was a Democrat and a genteel liberal he was not. The Republicans veered right with the ‘Southern Strategy’ and their success caused a ripple effect as southern Democrats became southern Republicans and northern Democrats veered left on social policy.
I get the feeling you’re more interested in a labor theory of history, but the working class and liberalism have only intermittently aligned in the US. By and large the rank and file of the KKK and IWW came from the same general economic background (and there were often a lot more of the former)
Not sure what a labor theory of history is, but my point was only that the Democratic Party national platforms, legislation, and rhetoric shifted further to the right after Roosevelt and continued on that trajectory through this election. I agree that liberalism and liberals are not fundamentally interested in the working class, and they have been less and less interested since FDR, who was forced to take their concerns seriously for several reasons.
By the popular vote numbers, Harris ran a great campaign; she pulled in 71.8 million votes. This is more than both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, and besting Obama in both of his elections even when adjusted proportionally for population. She didn’t yield Biden’s 81.7 million in 2020, but she also wasn’t coming into a field where the opposition’s massive failings in managing the response to what was a pretty mild global pandemic (by epidemiologist standards) and the daily churn that left everyone exhausted were still in the consciousness of the electorate. The voting public has a memory of politics about six months, and so all of the shit that occurred four years is blotted out by the specter of inflation and the ‘border crisis’.
Pundits can, of course, point to one thing or another that she ‘should have done’ differently although I have yet to see a single suggestion that would have actually reaped her another three millions votes. Maybe she could have gotten the margin in Michigan by embracing Palestinians and condemning Israel’s conduct in Gaza but then she’d lose pro-Israel votes elsewhere. She could have been more progressive but then she’d be slammed for being “too liberal”; or she could have gone full on centrist and told LGBTQ people that ‘it’s not your time’ and lost the progressive vote. The expectation that she needs to be some kind of political Stretch Armstrong and simultaneously please all of the multitude of competing demographics plus pull in all of the people who don’t normally vote but were frustrated enough to overcome their apathy in 2020 is kind of like asking an elephant to flap his ears and fly.
The question isn’t what Harris should have done differently; I mean, that is a question you can ask, but the real question is how did Trump pull in 75 million votes? By practical standards, he didn’t even really run a campaign; he just showed up at events and babbled on in total stream of consciousness, often for so long that crowds thinned and the message—aside from persecuting immigrants and “the enemy within”—was completely unclear. He literally danced his way through most of one event instead of even speaking, which for anyone concerned that verbal gaffs and stuttering were an indicator of Joe Biden’s inability to perform as president should have been a screaming air horn that Trump couldn’t even pay attention in the middle of an imminent crisis. Sure, he got the Evangelical Christian vote (most of it, anyway, despite fervent claims that they were abandoning him based on a few isolated congregations) because they have been trained to accept totally unfounded and counterfactual claims without criticism as long as their leaders (who, like Trump, are scammers manipulating people to their own ends) command it, but that is at best 30-40 million voters; only half, more or less, of the people who did vote for him. Where is the additional 35-45 million voters coming from? The vast majority of them were adults during the first Trump Administration and lived through the insanity of that; they’ve seen not only his character on full display, as Trump has no reserve or artifice, but also his ‘polices’ (such as they are), his management (best described as ‘mercurial’), and his ability to accept guidance on topics on which he is not well informed (everything to do with governance, for a start). And yet, they voted for him anyway, because…’the economy’? They wanted a ‘change’? Kamala Harris is too [take your pick of prejudices and fabrications]?
I think the reality here is that the American electorate at large has been well primed for fascism, and Trump is kind of their ideal despot; an unapologetic despot and sociopath who behaves in the public sphere as he did on a reality t.v. show. These are voters who have seen what Trump is and what he stands for; the wool was not pulled over their eyes; the didn’t ‘not know’ that he lies about what he promises to deliver and tells the truth when he threatens to persecute opponents; that he tried to interfere with an election and incited an insurrection to keep himself in power. They have elected to silo themselves off from a diversity of news and information so that they can be wrapped in the comfortable outrage of conspiranoia and nonsense that wouldn’t fool a fourteen year old and voted for a guy who literally said he wanted to become a dictator.
People have been conditioned to normalize that kind of behavior—which would have been instantly disqualifying in an earlier era of the last century—and they want someone with simple solutions to complex problems even if they are stupid and obviously unworkable. Newt Gingrich et al have provided the glossary and the backroom operators like Leonard Leo, funneling campaign money and buying judges, have essentially assured that when someone like Trump came along and grabbed the publics’ attention that he would be successful despite himself. Saying it was about “the economy” or they voted for Trump because they don’t like Harris’s association with Biden on Gaza is obvious nonsense; they voted for a fascist candidate because they want fascism and think that a wanna-be strongman is a better solution than working through the messiness and compromise of democratic processes.
Harris didn’t do anything ‘wrong’—at least, not moreso than any other normal politician—and pulled in a record numbers of voters only second to Biden. She just was set against a long-standing campaign to undermine the American psyche which was purposed designed to promote fascism. That she pulled in almost 72 million votes is a credit to how well she did under difficult circumstances with an improvised campaign that struggled to ‘message’ to the wide diversity of skeptical voters. We’re not here because she failed; we’re here because we, the American public, collectively failed to choose democracy over autocracy.
Stranger
She forgot to steal the law codes from Biden and launch a nuclear attack on the flyover states, eliminating a huge percentage of the dumbass contingent of American voters.
Fantastic post @Stranger_On_A_Train
I would still maintain though that a lot of votes were simply “eggs cost more now”, and if you only know facts like that in isolation, maybe your only opinion is “we need a change”.
Agree about all the rest though, and well put
None. But I think she would have lost the other swing states even worse. Jewish veep candidates are 0 for 1 (Liebermann). I think we have to accept that at this moment, the US is not ready for a female president. Nor would the US accept a Jewish president or vice president. Combining the two on one ticket would be twice as problematic.
Al Gore’s defeat proves that the US is not ready for a First Lady named Tipper (Tippers are 0 for 1).
Rule A :
Do not give speeches that sound like a University Professor to blokes who work in 7/11s.
That is, learn to talk to the nonunion working class.
But we elected a non-Jewish veep named Levi.
And women came in 0 for 1 but Harris was handed the nomination all the same.
Walz was a colossally boring choice from a safe state; I said at the time he was just like Tim Kaine and he sure was. There’s no way choosing Shapiro could have been a worse pick.
We need to become the economic populist party. Here’s what we did in this past election, which was clearly a failure.
GOP: “Your life has gotten worse, and it’s the fault of failed Democratic policies, and illegal immigrants.”
Dems: “Actually things aren’t that bad. The market is good, inflation is lower, employment is good. We are doing good things to help you, and we want to do more.”
Unfortunately, messages of fear and doom seem to be much more powerful than messages of hope and realism. The Dems need to change to this message if they want to win again.
Dems: “Your life has gotten worse, and its the result of the failed policies of Trump and the Republicans. They work with the corporate elites to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and they lie to you about who is to blame. It’s not immigrants, its THEM, and the rich! We want to help the working class get back to being afford a good life in this country, and we’re going to do that by stopping all these failed policies that continue to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”
I’ll second that. Really insightful.
I think this is fair (and also insightful).
Excellent response!
People are going to believe what they want to believe. I don’t think the numbers support the idea that a Democratic male would have beaten Trump in this election.
AOC has thoughts.
No black person had ever lost a general election before 2024.
Well Shapiro does have that friend whose wife “committed suicide” by stabbing herself in the back of the head ten times.
I’m not saying Shapiro covered up a murder. But I would like a better explanation from Shapiro himself as to why it looks like he covered up a murder.